


turn the page (maybe you’ll find a brand new ending)

by buckyjerkbarnes



Series: lost stars [1]
Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Diana needs (and gets) a hug, F/M, Steve Trevor Lives, THEY LOVE EACH OTHER SO DAMN MUCH, Zeus is actually a decent guy here, and i am thoroughly shooketh, and i couldn't NOT write a fix-it, i can't, i'm not crying you're crying, i've just got this beautiful film in my eye is all, ignore the writer behind the curtain, okay so i saw the film, post-Wonder Woman, pre-Justice League, wonder woman spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 04:24:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11096835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckyjerkbarnes/pseuds/buckyjerkbarnes
Summary: Humans have a preconceived notion passed through the ages by poets who reiterated the exact same message: time has the capability of healing wounds of yesterday. That, if enough minutes passed between the injury and the removal of the bloody gauze, what lays beneath will be a clean expanse of skin, untouched, unblemished, like nothing had occurred at all.Diana, however, knew this to be a falsity.[Or the one where Zeus is pretty decent dad and Diana is rewarded for all she’s sacrificed.]





	turn the page (maybe you’ll find a brand new ending)

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so after someone commented on "The Odyssey" wondering if I was going to bring back Steve Trevor and I went and opened my big fat mouth before I had seen Wonder Woman and said no, I got to thinking. And then the gears got to grinding and I couldn't help but just?? Get all up in my feelings? I basically binge wrote this in about eight hours and woo boy. Enjoy!!!!
> 
> Edit: THANK YOU FOR 800 KUDOS!!!

 

 

Humans have a preconceived notion passed through the ages by poets who reiterated the exact same message: time has the capability of healing wounds of yesterday. That, if enough minutes passed between the injury and the removal of the bloody gauze, what lays beneath will be a clean expanse of skin, untouched, unblemished, like nothing had occurred at all.

Diana, however, knows this is a falsity.

Perhaps she was excluded because she was not human. Either way, her memory was too sharp for anything to slip through the cracks of her mind. She recalled the degenerative disease that plagued the middle to elder in age, with its foggy nails sinking into their brains and wiping away all that swirls together to form a personality, a walking history, and shook herself hard.

No matter how much she ached, Diana would never wish to forget. Not Steve. She refused to forget Steve Trevor.

(He is, was, and shall always be the deepest and rawest of her wounds. Steve, in this monotone world, served as splash of color; the gold of his hair, the bright, precious blue of his irises, the beige of his thickly stitched sweater are pigments that Diana has both preserved and never seen again since she lost him.)

It would be a century in just over a year and a month since he gave his life for the all the tomorrows and Diana never went a day without thinking of him. Each morning, Diana’s sternum panged, more of a dull flame flickering than the profound stabbing sensation that used to plague her. She’d see a dapper coat and wonder what it would look like fitted across his shoulders or would head for a walk along the Seine and spot an ice cream vendor, wishing Steve was there to take her hand and order them a pair of vanilla cones. Diana had a perpetual migraine during the nineties, when technology was advancing so rapidly that there was a new development practically twice a day. She wondered what he’d think about the Nazis of the second war, about the developments between Anglo-American relations though the twentieth century, about the jets that were so fast they could shatter the sound barrier.

Most importantly, she mused whether or not Steve’s view of humanity would have changed as hers did.

Bruce’s gift, that photo she’d spent a better part of the twenties trying to track down before admitting defeat, was still in the black brief case of which it had been delivered. If she knew she could have done so without her voice breaking, Diana would have called her friend to thank him, but she had settled with an email, instead, bearing a single line— _Thank you for bringing him back to me._ There would come a time when she told him of her origins, but her heart was heavy and she didn’t think she could manage to get it all out at once, not today.

For the kindness of his labors, Diana could admit she owed Bruce that much.

As Diana stepped into her apartment building, the sky was cloudless, fading into the rich violet of twilight, the colors so abnormally rich Diana felt she could reach out, drag her fingers across the sky and come away with a multitude of oranges and pinks dripping down her arm. Steve’s watch was wrapped securely around her wrist, a familiar weight. She smiled at Harold the doorman, who tipped his cap to her and slanted her with a rosy grin. She asked about his wife, who had taken a terrible fall a few weeks previous, and Harold was sure to tell her that Claire was _doing much better, thank you, Miss Prince._

She took the stairs rather than confine herself to the steel cage of the elevator. It helped to knock the edge off the excess energy just simmering beneath her skin, waiting for her to put it to good use. Bruce hadn’t said anything about it in almost two weeks, but she knew he was still searching for the other meta-humans, There had been a sighting of Arthur Curry in a small town in Greenland, another video of Barry Allen appearing at point A then rapidly turning up at point Z all of a blink later, but other than this, their task was still left unfinished. And then the photo. It was the photo that really threw her.

Diana paused only for a moment in the hallway, eyes closed as she focused on the soft _tick-tick_ of the wrist watch. She took a breath, held it for the length of five _ticks_ then let it out.

She undid the lock on the door, striding inside and sat her purse on the table a few paces into the entryway, settling her keys in a shallow bowl painted to resemble a piece of Aegean pottery, an russet and ebony etching depicting Atlas bracing the world on his back. Diana didn’t place the briefcase down until she stood in the kitchen, sure to lower the case carefully, though Bruce had been exceedingly thorough in his packaging, in the middle of the counter. She didn’t open it, not again and didn’t think she could until she made arrangements for a custom frame to be made and delivered.

The room, which had been bathed in the gold just before the sun dipped below the horizon, flared electric blue as veins of lightning ripped across the heavens, prompting Diana to turn sharply on her heal. She stilled, taking two long steps back at the sight of a figure sitting in her armchair. Silhouetted only by the sudden shadow sheathing the world and the occasional burst of lightning, was a gray haired man. His shoulders were broad, fitting given his sturdy build and his tall stature; it was too dark for her to tell if he had any weapons on his person, for her to determine if he’d been in her home long enough to locate her sword. It was when thick sheets of rain began to pelt the windows and the bolts of electricity came quicker and quicker that she realized just who had invaded her space.

“Zeus,” Diana said. She couldn’t help the awed note to her voice.

Her father flashed a small, crooked smile at her, a hand planted on either arm of the chair. When he drummed his digits, little bursts of blue crackled from the pads of his fingers. “Hello, Diana.”

She needed to get the most obvious question of the way: “Why are you here?”

The downpour increased in intensity. “I believed it to be time to pay you a visit.”

It was by sheer force of will Diana withheld a snort. Her voice was not unkind, merely bemused. “Do you have any idea, if I were a human, how much child support you would owe after a few thousand years?”

When Zeus laughed, she swore she could feel thunder roll through her very bones. “Then let us be thankful we are not mortal, no?” Diana walked backward the few feet separating her and the light switch, flipping it on and restoring at least a fraction of the golden light his storm had sapped away. “I saw your mother.”

Diana’s heart faltered. She thought of Hippolyta as often as she did Steve, with Antiope’s memory following just behind. They did not sting as much to think about, as her mother lived on and Antiope had several millennia under her belt before dying honorably, if far too soon for Diana’s liking. “Is she well?” she choked softly. “Is my mother well? And what of Themyscira? Have there been any more invasions?”

“You must know, my child, that I did not actually speak to Hippolyta, but she retains the same strength and power she did when she led the fight against Ares, when she first did her part in creating you. I may not have shown myself, but I have always presided over your dearest homeland—I saw you grow, saw how hard you trained.” Diana found that, once she wagered a few steps closer, that Zeus’s eyes were a dark brown like her own; though they held the same depthless intensity of Ares’, Diana found comfort in the tender edges of Zeus’s gaze where there had been wrath in her brother’s. “I kept any other vessel from getting near the island, so do not fret on that front.”

Words bubbled out of Diana, quick things right off her tongue: “If you were always present, why then didn’t you—?” 

Zeus’s hands stilled. He suddenly appeared every bit of the old, jaded god of Grecian mythology. “I did not show myself because I felt I need not prompt more grief, not when I knew the path the Fates had laid out for you. You are everything to your mother, Diana—I didn’t wish to drop in and out of your lives and simply serve as another heartbreak when you set off to complete the destiny you were born for.”

Anger welled up in her, an abrupt thing, like the jagged shift of two tectonic plates. “You could have come after I had left. You could have at least offered her some sort of solace.”

“She had the utmost faith in your abilities,” Zeus countered, never wavering from his gentle speech. “My assurances wouldn’t have done anything by way of comfort.”

Diana could accept that, even if the inside of her mouth tasted like she’d bitten directly into a lemon and then her tongue immediately after. But it still didn’t add up to the stories she had been raised with, not when the rest of the so-called legends had actually been preserved truths. “How are you alive?”

He searched through the forest of things she did not say, coming up with a crisp response, as though Zeus had simply been waiting for her to prompt him. “The fight between Ares and I did not kill me, but I was severely wounded. I hid myself until I had the strength to breathe life into you, the one the world has waited ages for.” Zeus waved her close—Diana could not help obey in moving to crouch before him. His palm curled to the side of her neck and she didn’t think she was imagining the way static crackled through his thick beard, the scent of ozone clinging to the inside of her nostrils. “And while I know intimately how hubris can bring entire kingdoms to their knees, that does not stop me from being exceedingly proud of all you have done for this world, Diana.”

A flush curled lightly in the circles of her cheeks. Diana did not bother to repress a half smile. “My duties have only just begun.”

“I know,” he said softly, eyes roving over her features. She wondered if he was picking out what physical similarities they shared or if he already had a growing list. “You have a great deal ahead of you. I will do what I can, but it up to you to trek with intelligence and grace.”

They indulged for each other’s curiosity, simply watching, memorizing. Somehow, though he never uttered anything to suggest so, Diana knew this was the first and final time they would speak face to face. “What did you really come here for, father?”

Zeus flashed her his brightest grin yet, something full of teeth and crinkled eyes. “You have given so much for this world and it is such a rarity for this world to give anything for you.” _It gave me Steve,_ she thought. _For however brief, I had Steve and that is everything._ “I have, in all my power, shaped this world so you have guaranteed compensation.”

She almost made another comment about child support, nearly asked if his gift was a Pegasus like the one Athena had tamed for Perseus. Diana refrained, though, and fell back on a simple response, instead. “Oh?”

The rain was easing up and the lightning was becoming less and less harsh. Zeus had never stopped smiling, even as his eyes misted and he held her face with a few more degrees of firmness. “You will find your reward for all you’ve done very soon, my child.” And, as though divulging only half a secret Diana did not understand, he added: “It is only a matter of time.”

When she dared blink, she was kneeling before a vacant chair and the sun was finally lowering its face to sleep. There were no remnants of raindrops on her window—the only signs that she had not just risen from a fever dream was the slight singeing of her upholstery and the lingering smell of petrichor that seemed to permeate every corner of the room.

 

( * * * )

 

Diana did not sleep and thus she did not take Steve’s watch off her wrist. This eliminated the daily step of picking the watch off her dresser, of threading the gently worn leather through the metal loop and smoothing the end in place.

It was likely due to this she did not realize sooner.

The watch, this priceless piece of a past she could no longer touch, had stopped working. The hands had stilled on the numbers eight twenty-three and without the ever-present _tick-tick_ her apartment was deathly quiet.

“No,” Diana whispered, giving the time piece a helpless shake as though all it needed was a bit of jostling to get started again. “No!” _I don’t know when that watch became his heartbeat, but now they’ve both gone silent and—and—and—_

She tore out of her chair, the one her father had occupied less than twelve hours previous, and rushed to dress. Diana pulled on a gold blouse with a V-cut for the neckline, yanking on black slacks and shoving her feet into a pair of brown boots lacking any sort of stiletto heals. She needed to move quick and fluidly and, after she hauled a black leather coat off the hanger and slung her purse on her arm, she cradled the watch close, as though it were a sick infant.

Even in a hurry, she managed to take the stairs three at once and noiselessly.

 

( * * * )

 

 _Une Question de Temps_ was a small shop wedged between a bakery and a boutique specializing in children’s clothes. It was a bright building with a gilded etching of the store’s name stamped proudly across the window front. The moment she stepped inside, breathless and her heart loitering in the snug place between her mouth and her pharynx, Diana’s hearing was assaulted by a fierce _clang-thrum-snick-boom_ of several hundred time pieces all operating at once. The easiest noise to digest was the tinkle of the bell over the door announcing her entry.

“Mmphf,” came a muffled grunt from the back, behind the counter and through a door that led she knew not where. “I’ll— _dang it_ —I’ll help you in a minute! I’m just sorting out a bit of paperwork!” 

Diana froze where she stood, barely halfway down an aisle lined with tiny bits of machinery, gears and the like. The voice was American, but it was more than just that. She would know it blindly and if her mind had been wiped of everything else, that voice would be the only thing she managed to salvage. Diana had never experienced any sort of hallucinations. This was not her only instance of pulling an all-nighter and she hadn’t undergone any sort of damage to her cognitive functions, either. She held the watch closer, grounded by the chill of the square of glass protecting the motionless black and white face.

Just as sudden as the tempest had come the night before, the lights shuddered and she once again could feel an energy current thrumming through the room. The footsteps which had been heading her direction so clearly faltered. There was a flash of that same electric blue radiance that slinked along Zeus’s fingers that was so bright it sent pin-pricks shooting up behind her eyes. 

The roar of the clocks faded away: all Diana knew was the blood pounding behind her ears. She never loosened her hold on the watch. It was the only thing that kept her from fleeing the shop, from fleeing the country, even. Diana had gone up against actual gods and monsters—if it all welled up to a fight, she would be able to stand her ground or, in the very least, put on a façade like she wasn’t on the verge of crumbling.

Steve Trevor rounded the corner, planting a hand on the doorjamb to steady himself. His eyes blew open widely when they landed on her, lower lip trembling as he stepped fully into the room.

It couldn’t be him. That was what logic said.

(She was about to make like Bruce and shoot logic in the face for all she wanted to hear what it suggested.)

Diana had _seen_ his plane shoot straight up into the atmosphere, had watched the swell of the explosion claim Steve’s life to save the millions that would have died had they allowed the gas to douse London. The phantom pains of those tank treads Ares had tried to smother her into the ground with, holding her hostage while she watched the love of her life go farther and farther out of her reach threatened to bring her to her knees. There had been no way he could have survived—he was so human and no human could have made it through a blast like that.

And yet.

Gods he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever had the good fortune to lay eyes on. Diana worked in close contact with some of the finest artifacts from across the world, across the muddled sheet of history, everything from sculptures to weaponry to pieces of fine art and all of them paled compared to Steve. Gold, blue, beige—he was even wearing a chunky knit sweater similar to the one she’d last seen him in.

All the years they spent apart, where she believed him to be eternally out of reach, didn’t even stretch so far as the handful of seconds it took for Diana to shake off the feeling of being kicked in the solar plexus by Hermes’ winged sandals. It was she who managed to make her mouth come back online, who retained enough control over her vocal cords to croak: “Steve?”

A sound like a sob shot through his teeth. “ _Diana_.” It was not a question. It was a surety, a promise, a vow. A real sob of her own broke out past her heart and she shot forward, hand outstretched to take the one he extended.

Their fingers linked and did not pass though one another’s. She wasn’t sure why she believed he’d be made of vapors like something out of a horror film. Steve grinned, eyes red rimmed and bluer than even the waters around Themyscira. He released her only to cup her face between his hands— _he’s warm, he’s real, he’s_ here— and Steve’s ragged exhale fanning across her lips and chin was everything.

“My angel,” Steve croaked. His hair flopped across his forehead as he gave a little shake in shock. “I—I—”

“I thought you were lost to me,” Diana whispered miserably, touching at his neck where the blood rushed beneath his skin the strongest, where she could count his heartbeats as easy as if she had her ear pressed to his chest. “I thought I would never get to hold you again. To touch you. To _see_ you.”

“Yeah,” he said on the end of a shuddering exhale. “There were a lot of things I didn’t think I’d ever get to do or say, too.”

“And?”

Steve blinked, stuttered out: “And?”

Diana threaded her fingers through the downy soft hair at the base of his skull. She stepped closer so when his chest rose with breath, hers was falling and she could feel it with no problem. “What are the things you didn’t think you’d get to do or say?”

He barked a laugh. “You really want me to narrow it down to one?”

She smiled and, though she maintained the ability to jump great distances, to fly, for the first time since he’d been lost from her, Diana was weightless, pumped to the point of overflowing with joy. “For now.”

“I think I can maybe work with that.” His mouth found hers, one arm encircling her waist as his free hand spanned the right half of her ribcage. Though every instinct screamed for her to do otherwise, Diana’s eyes fluttered shut and she bumped his nose with hers as a silent signal for him to part his lips. He did, their tongues meeting in the middle in a clash of damp heat. She whimpered at the taste of coffee clinging to his breath and good Hera he even smelled the same.

When they parted, she was already speaking:

“Your watch,” Diana said, practically bursting with the need to explain herself. “I came here because your watch stop—”

Faint as the flutter of a bird’s wing, Diana heard that treasured _tick-tick_ that had gone silent start up again, detected the minuscule vibration of the hands launching into motion once more against the dip of her palm. She let out an incredulous noise, more of a cry of disbelief than anything in the region of amusement.

Zeus’s words returned to her, so clear he might have just spoken them directly into her ear. “It’s only a matter of time,” he’d uttered. _Une question de temps._ A matter of time. Diana let out a laugh, tears clinging and threatening to drop from her eyelashes: she’d walked past this shop a million times on her way to work, had passed by the window and admired the work displayed in the front curio case for actual years.

Had they really just been missing each other by such a small margin? Her gaze shot back up to his face, unwilling to stray from the sight of it any longer.

Diana swore she saw a shadow, barely a shift in a patch of light, recede into the back of the shop. She would analyze that later because in the now, Steve was staring as though he’d never seen anything like her before. “You kept that battered old thing?” he choked out.

“Of course I did,” she said, a touch desperate for him to understand. “It was all I had of you.”

(This was only partially a lie: after the victory celebration, when the square in London was clear and it was just her amongst the fog rolling in off the Thames, Diana had stolen that photo of Steve leaning up against his plane. That photograph had only left its frame once and that was to be carefully copied by a professional photo company so she had the power to take him with her across the world without worrying about damaging the original.)

He shook his head in amazement. She wasn’t sure if he’d blinked more than twice. “You’re so beautiful,” Steve whispered, speaking low and quick as though they were standing within the shaking confines of a dream and the frame was wavering and collapsing around them.

This was not a dream, though. Diana had entertained a great many of those and none felt so real as this one. She dipped in to kiss him, chaste for all their first press of lips was greedy and reacquainting. “Slower,” Diana encouraged. “Speak slower.”

“I should have said that more often,” and he did, indeed, abide by her words, but he had yet to shake his frantic edge. She could have wrapped her lasso around his wrist and he’d have spoken just as swiftly and packed just as much conviction. “I should have told you how much I valued your kindness, your wit. I should have told you I adore your brilliant mind and that you made me want to be better, that you made me want to fight harder. I should have held you longer that night, you know the one, and that I never want to let you go again.” Steve paused, sheepish. “But it’s in that _I understand you make your own choices and you’re everything to me_ way not that _overly possessive probably needs to take a long trip to prison_ sort of way.”

The room blurred as Diana chuckled wetly. There was no cacophony of explosions to deafen her, nothing to prompt a metallic ringing in her ears this time around. She tipped in so they were pressed together chests to boots. She said what had been clinging to the backs of her teeth for ninety-nine years and she finally had the chance to utter aloud:  “I love you, too,” Diana breathed. “I’ve loved you from the moment I met you and there has never been a second when I’ve doubted how I feel. Even when you weren’t here, you inspired me to be the greatest person I could possibly be, to help this flawed, multifaceted species not out of a sense of duty, but out of love. You, Steve Trevor, are the absolute best of me.”   

Another laugh tumbled out of Steve’s throat and she thumbed away tears that puttered out his eye’s corners. “Wow, I’m glad I spoke before you.”

“It was a good speech,” she assured him. “Very good.”

She still held his watch and she let him go just long enough to reach out for his wrist. He made a soft noise of protest. “Diana, no,” he said. “I gave it to _you_.”

“I know,” Diana retorted, void of heat. “And I’m choosing to return it.” His hand fell away, allowing her to do up the notch and slip the worn, leather strap home around the delicate bone of his wrist. “I’ve held onto it for so long, I can track the seconds without so much as glancing at it. I have you—I have you and you have me.” She made her smile gentle and teasing, eyes crinkling. “But not in that overly possessive probably needs to take a long trip to prison sort of way. Do recall you come with the watch, so it’s not as though I’ll never see it.”

He smoothed his hands up her sides then over her shoulders until he was holding either side of her head. Steve’s thumbs brushed circles along the hinge of her jaw. He gave another one of those disbelieving shakes of his head. “I’m so in love with you. I’m stupid with it.”

“No worse than I,” she murmured.

Steve Trevor, a walking miracle, a gift from the gods themselves, was in her arms again. Diana didn’t think she’d ever stop smiling. Not for a few years at least—she bet it would give Bruce hives, all the _happy_ , and smiled wider.

Standing in the middle of his little shop, where the clock noises were beginning to fade into focus once more, Steve bumped his forehead against hers, his nose sliding in alongside her own. They were both breathing hard, as though they’d just ran a great distance. “Is it too soon to make a joke about time?”

Diana didn’t give him the chance too—she pulled him back in for a kiss and time went fluid and limitless again.

 

( * * * )

 

It was later, after they had closed the shop down about six hours early and had lunch at a street café with the Eiffel Tower planted near enough to see. They lay together making like a pair of closed parenthesis, nose to nose, toe to toe with his hand stroking through her hair, along her spine. “I dreamed about you,” Steve told her, curled in her bed and up along her front. “Ever since I was a kid. I moved to Paris because I once dreamed you were standing in front of the Louvre and if there was a snowball’s chance I could find you, I was going to do whatever it took to succeed.”

They had not exchanged intimacies of the flesh, rather opting to latch onto each other, breathe the same air just as they’d done that night in Veld. Both of them had torn out of _Une Question de Temps_ with a speed that left skid marks in their wake, not willing to waste a moment.

(Steve may or may not have yelled carpe diem at passerby, but that was for them to know.)

“I do work there,” she told him, smiling at the relief that surfaced in his features. “In the archives.”

Steve flushed. “Ah,” he said, burying the left side of his face bashfully in his pillow. “Well.”

“What?” she asked, brow furrowing. “What is it, my love?”

If anything, his blush deepened. She let her fingers skate over the blood-warmed skin, encouraging him to let her see the entirety of his face again. “I don’t think I can count how many days I spent just wandering the Louvre aimlessly. I did all this research… Went when the museum was at its most crowded, then when that didn’t work I went when it was the least crowded. I think I know the layout of that place better than any of the security guards by now.”

She told him what she’d realized earlier, how _Une Question de Temps_ was a place she saw each day to and from her job. “So, in retrospect, I don’t think you should feel so foolish.”

Steve tightened his hold on her. “It’s funny.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, no,” he rushed to say. “Not the just barely missing each other thing—I hate that. I hate that, Diana, I’d never think that’s _funny_. The, uh, fact that the universe drove me to go ‘hey! I know what’s a good idea—build and repair clocks for a living’ when I had told you I wished for more time before, well. If that ain’t a kick in the head, I don’t know what is.”

Diana, who had picked up on this prior to Steve pointing out such a thing, hummed. “It would seem the gods, however great the odds are in our favor, have not been stiff-lipped with their strokes of dramatic irony.”

“Dramatic irony, she says,” Steve muttered, smacking a kiss to her forehead then to her nose, to her eyebrow, to her cheekbone, to her mouth, where he lingered the longest. She nipped at his lower lip, delighting in his low groan. “Sounds like you’re comparing our lives to one of Sophocles’ plays.”

“Oh, not at all,” Diana told him. “All the tragedy has been left behind in act one. We’re standing strong in the spotlight for the second half of the show.”

She should have, in all honesty, expected the tide of conversation to turn a bit harsh, sliding them onto choppy waves where the entirety of the morning and the afternoon had been smooth sailing.

“You haven’t aged,” he whispered, dejected. “It’s been a hundred years, Diana…”

“No,” she hushed him, stroking his cheek and shuddering in the best possible way at the scratch of stumble. If Diana never saw such a broken expression cross his visage again it would be too soon. “Don’t let your mind think like that. Please. Zeus was the one to bring you back to me—you once said you wished we had more time, my love, and that’s exactly what we’ve been given.”

“More time,” Steve echoed, less pale after he allowed a few beats of quiet to absorb her assertion. “Granted by your _Dad_.”

Diana nodded her affirmation. “Which is as much as an assurance as we could hope to receive that things will be different this time around.” _We know how precious this thing between us is,_ she did not say and was well aware that he was not the least bit oblivious to this. “The world has changed, Steve. But we’ve changed with it, adapted to it. We are strong enough, that I believe in.”

His hair stuck up too many directions to accurately place a number on, the result of her fingers carding deftly through them. “Oh good,” he sighed, shifting just enough to tug at the blankets. She nudged at his calf with her ankle, snorting when Steve let out a squeak at the sensation of her cold toes pressing into his skin. “We’re on the same page, then.”

 

( * * * )

 

With the dawn, Diana stirred. A blanket-warmed hand was spread wide across her abdomen, a pair of legs tangled up with her own. She opened her eyes, lifting up onto her elbow just enough to peer back over her shoulder.

He was still there, sound asleep and drooling handsomely. Diana stifled a laugh. She didn’t think she would be able to jump when Bruce needed her for a while. A month. Maybe two at the most depending on the severity of the situation. Steve would dislike it when he figured out she was hitting the breaks on her life on his behalf, but she would counter that she had lived long enough without him and wanted to do so in the name of lost time. That would, for the grace period she thought they deserved, hold out as a valid claim.

When it was crucial she do so, Diana would fight. Zeus, himself, had said she’d given so much for the world; it was high time the world allowed her to bask in the glow of what had been returned to her.

The longer she watched him, careful not to jostle his prone form, the less her hold on the present became. How many nights had she agonized over what-ifs? How, if things had worked out differently in another lifetime, she would have won the fight and the plane would have been delayed in taking off and she would have blown it up with Steve still on the ground. Her body would not have been affected by the blast and when she landed, he’d have taken her in his arms, gripping her tight because he had faith in her unwavering strength. They’d have kissed among the whoops and cheers of soldiers liberated from Ares’ influence. They would have had drinks at a London bar the night of the armistice and they’d have crashed at his flat for days, indulging in each other’s company. She’d have married him if he’d asked, held his hand and wore a ring and bore his last name.

She still would, no hesitation. She’d always say yes to him.

Her head rushed as it struck her such a thing could shake off the intangibility of a daydream and become a reality. He wasn’t going anywhere. Steve was alive and well and he remembered her. He loved her. Was in love with her, present tense.

(Diana, for no longer than a minute, slipped back into her memories, living it all in reverse. His plane mended itself on the backdrop of a bruised sky, returning to the runway. He ran backward to her and said his final words from last to first. The pain in her chest, that constant, pulsing ache, was sapped right out of her as if it had never settled, never prompted so much grief to begin with.)

She shifted back down into the heated spot their bodies had claimed in the sheets, burrowed in their mingling scents, and shut her eyes. Steve’s fingers flexed at her hip, an unconscious shift of muscles.

They had all the time in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @ fypoedameron
> 
> In all honesty, though Wonder Woman has been my favorite superhero since I was like three years old, I've always admired Diana for her strength and her moral compass that just screams do the right thing. To see her finally get a film that's both true to her character and empowering as hell in a time where little girls (and little boys) need as much empowerment as they can get, has sent me into this euphoric state I've not been able to shake since walking out of the movies. This and the fact that Steve Trevor/Chris Pine is too precious for this world I couldn't just let him stay dead. For all the character of Diana has done for me, I owe her that much. See you all soon!!


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